Central Javanese Music: The Patet of Laras Slendro and the Gender Barung

Abstract

e wish to add to the understanding of patet. The way has been prepared by Mantle Hood (1954), but more information is continuing to become available, especially in recent years. The non-analytic (in a western sense) approach to music (aural transmission-rote learning), traditional in the central Javanese courts is giving way in modern Indonesia to state-sponsored schools that strive to provide systematic studies in many areas of music, practical and theoretical. Knowledge of and use of cipher notation is now commonplace for all save the oldest court musicians and efforts are underway to set down in notation, for most instruments moreover, the entire repertory. However, notated parts are still not used during actual performances; their use is limited to teaching. Full scores are not used at all. At the same time analysis of the repertory is beginning to become more practical, more empirical. As a result, and with regard to patet, it is possible to add to and sometimes to alter Mr. Hood's groundbreaking observations regarding the modes of central Javanese music. Moreover, given the theoretical work underway at a school such as ASKI in Solo, which celebrated but its tenth birthday in July 1974, we can expect many more additions and adjustments in the future. For the present we are limiting ourselves to a discussion of patet in laras slendro as it appears in the Solo-Jogja repertory and to the part played by the gender barung. The patet of laras pelog offer problems still more numerous and opaque and remain to be dealt with in future essays. We wish here to explicate two points that to our knowledge are new to the discussion of slendro patet in the West. First we call attention to the part played by the gender barung (or, simply, gender), one of the panerusan or elaborating instruments in the gamelan and one of the commonly accepted leading instruments. In the past only the balungan, or fixed melody or nuclear theme, played by various instruments but especially the saron, has received scrutiny as regards patet, due probably to the fact it was the only part notated in court manuscripts, and other parts of the karawitan or performance of music have been ignored-a method, incidentally, that in general still gives satisfactory results. But the gender part is often clear in patet on those occasions when the balungan is problematic. This is not to say that at times the gender part itself is not ambiguous. But examining it in